Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [9]
Handgun access among children is not strictly an urban problem. The Harris poll found the degree of access to be surprisingly constant between rural, suburban, and urban communities. More than 60 percent of children who lived in cities said they could get a handgun if they wished; 58 percent of suburban kids claimed they could too. A University of North Carolina study of adolescents in suburban and rural communities in the Southeast found that 9 percent of the boys actually owned a handgun. Boys typically received their first firearm—usually a shotgun or a rifle but seven percent of the time a handgun—at the age of twelve and a half. More than a fifth, however, received their first guns at the very responsible age of ten.
Kids have begun using their guns against each other. From 1965 to 1990, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the rate at which children age ten through seventeen were arrested for homicide increased by 332 percent, despite a slight drop in that segment of the population. Anyone inclined to dismiss these figures as reflecting merely the high rate of homicide in the nation’s black urban neighborhoods would be profoundly mistaken. The incidence of homicide arrests of white children increased in the same period by 425 percent.
Increasingly, you don’t need to own a gun or be the intended target of someone else’s gun to get shot. As guns have proliferated, the rate at which bystanders are wounded and killed has soared. In 1985 stray bullets killed four New Yorkers; in 1990 they killed forty.
Gun merchants and hobbyists steadfastly protest that guns aren’t the problem and, even if they were, that gun ownership is explicitly endorsed by the Second Amendment of the Constitution—the much misquoted “right to bear arms” clause—and is therefore as much a part of the American way as, say, voting. A comparison of international homicide statistics proves that guns do indeed set America apart from the rest of the developed world.
In 1987, America’s civilian guns were used to murder 3,187 young men age fifteen to twenty-four, accounting for three-fourths of the annual homicide rate in this demographic group of 21.9 per 100,000 people.
In Canada only seventeen young men were murdered with firearms, for an overall rate of 2.9 per 100,000.
In Japan, with 0.5 homicides per 100,000 people, eight young men died in gunshot homicides—as many killings as New York police encounter on a single busy weekend.
What accounts for the difference? Incidence of poverty, surely. Racial division. America’s frontier history and the myths it conjured. The influence of television and movies.
And the sheer number of guns.
It is easy to challenge any study that purports to show a direct relationship between firearms proliferation and the rate of violent crime. Which came first, the challenge goes, the rise in gun sales or the crime rate? Did the increase in the number of guns encourage more people to commit crime? Or did the increase in crime drive more people to buy guns to defend themselves? The ease of making this challenge and the impossibility of ever fully defending against it have allowed the gun camp to obscure the debate over firearms distribution, when in fact there is an abundance of credible evidence that where there are more guns, there are more deaths from guns. The NRA’s sloganeering notwithstanding, the evidence suggests that guns do indeed kill people.
A landmark study in King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, found that a gun kept at home was forty-three times more likely to be used to kill its owner,